Home phase begins for Ducks

With one of the more difficult stretches of their schedule behind them, the Ducks begin another phase today with clearly defined areas to address.

Tonight's game against Minnesota begins a span of 16 of the next 21 games at home for the Ducks, who turn their attention toward shoring up their penalty killing and getting off to better starts. They must do so without injured James Wisniewski, a key penalty killer and top-four defender.

Ryan Whitney and Scott Niedermayer each played more than 26 minutes in Sunday's game, the first without Wisniewski. Expected to ease that workload are fellow defensemen Steve Eminger, Nick Boynton, Luca Sbisa and Sheldon Brookbank.

“These guys have got to step up and do something that's not normally asked of you when a guy who plays a lot of minutes is out,” Whitney said. “That's what we're going to need.”

Wisniewski's absence hurts the penalty killing unit, which has surrendered eight power play goals in five games.

While some of those goals were of the fluky variety, this is a trend that stems from last season when the Ducks finished 23rd in penalty killing.

“I think the biggest we can't do is we can't get frustrated,” Todd Marchant (above) said. “You have positives and you have to learn from your mistakes. Obviously we're going to be looking at some video and try and clean those areas up. It's still early and we've got a lot of new personnel.”

Coach Randy Carlyle is also chalking up some of the issues to mixing in new players such as Eminger, Sbisa and Boynton.

“The identity of your team is created,” he said. “It's not just something that you put on it. You'd like (it) to take one game, two games, but it's something you have to reinforce.”

Whitney didn't necessarily give the group a pass because it's early in the season, though.

“These points count just as much as the ones in March,” he said. “We've got to get our special teams on track and we've got to have better starts - things that we've really got to start improving here because all of a sudden you don't want to be 10, 15 games in and you're still going through the same issues.”

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